PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT CORE (PDC) PROJECT SUMMARY Despite extensive investigations into the effects of radiation on normal tissues, there is a dearth of agents for mitigating radiation exposure as might occur as a result of terrorist action. The Product Development Core (PDC) within the UCLA-CMCR Program has developed an effective infrastructure for the discovery and development of novel mitigators. With time this Core has evolved away from high throughput screening for Projects to perform more chemoinformatics, drug synthesis and optimization, and pharmacokinetics. In acknowledgement of its evolving role, it has been renamed the Product Development Core (PDC). It will retain many of its functions in drug discovery, but has repositioned itself with added expertise to perform more pharmaceutical chemistry and organic synthesis; chemoinformatics and drug optimization; high-throughput assay development for toxicology, mechanism-of-action (MOA) and biomarker screening; pharmacokinetics mass spectrometry; pharmacodynamics and absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME) mass spectrometry; deep sequencing and transcriptomics informatics; and biomarker mass spectrometry. In doing so, the PDC will be in a better position to provide information on mitigators that will be selected by the Executive Committee for further testing in animal models of ARS and DEARE, further reassessment in the PDC, before advancing for product development. In this way, we anticipate that the mitigator development process will be streamlined and optimized, saving time and animals while producing a better mitigator drug. Based upon our prior successes and the combined expertize of the PDC team we are confident of our ability to further develop mitigator products toward eventual deployment in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).